Since the Law Is Finished, What Is Sin?
If the covenant that created “sin” is over, what exactly are Christians being condemned for?
Since the law that defined sin is finished, sin is also finished. Paul’s own formula is blunt: “For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20, RSVCE). If knowledge of sin comes through the law, then once that law is complete and its jurisdiction ended, there is no leftover metaphysical substance called “sin” hovering behind ordinary cruelty, exploitation, or self‑aggrandizement. Those are just human actions and their consequences, describable without any covenantal charge attached. Once the legal structure that made sin a category is gone, the word no longer contains any substance of its own.
This does not mean cruelty, exploitation, betrayal, or indifference somehow become acceptable or unreal. Those actions and their consequences are as concrete and destructive as ever. What disappears is the covenantal charge that sat on top of them—the formal category of “sin” as a violation of a binding law code carrying a divine legal penalty. Once that code has run its course, you are left with real harms, real responsibilities, and real damage, but without an extra layer of legal mystique hovering over them.
The crack in the usual Christian story opens right in the Ten Commandments. “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8, RSVCE) is not a marginal footnote; it is the fourth word of the core set, given more explanation than any of the others. Yet neither Jesus nor most contemporary Christians treat Sabbath as a non‑negotiable moral demand. “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27, RSVCE) is taken as permission, not as a permanent legal claim. A commandment once treated as a creation‑level fixture of right relationship with God is now functionally optional. Once one of the central ten commandments can be relativized this way, no other law is off limits.
New Testament theology turns that pressure up, not down. Paul insists that believers are “not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:14, RSVCE), and that “Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified” (Romans 10:4, RSVCE). Taken straightforwardly, that sounds like the law’s jurisdiction has expired. If sin was defined as violation of that law—transgressing its commands and incurring its curse—then the legal category of sin expired with it.
The failure of the “law of Christ” patch
To avoid this conclusion, many traditions appeal to “the law of Christ.” The phrase appears, but it is never fully spelled out as a new code. Paul writes, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2, RSVCE). Some theologians try to define it as “the law as interpreted and embodied by Jesus.” In actual practice, “law of Christ” is a brand name that different communities fill with wildly different contents: strict gender hierarchy and sexual prohibition here, social‑justice activism there, performative piety and church attendance elsewhere. The label stays the same; the ethic underneath it shifts.
That is precisely why “love” gets drafted as the unifying solution. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13:34, RSVCE). “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law… Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:8, 10, RSVCE). “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14, RSVCE). On the page, this looks like a clean center: if there is love, God’s will is fulfilled.
Paul’s famous description of love heightens the appeal: “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:4–8a, RSV‑2CE).
The abstract language used in this passage is comforting; however, in practical terms a unified understanding of “love” fractures the moment the question arises how much it should cost. For some believers, love means being generally polite, giving to charity when it does not hurt, and keeping personal comfort mostly intact. For others, love demands material loss, risky solidarity, and real exposure to danger. There is no shared metric of warranted sacrifice. How many hours, how much money, how much risk to safety, how much surrender of power—none of that is specified. There is no single, agreed‑upon Christian answer to “how far must love go?” There is no common Christian answer to whether any of them has gone “far enough,” or whether the first has gone nowhere at all. The supposed center—love—does not tell you where the floor or ceiling of sacrifice sits. That ambiguity is not a minor detail. It exposes that there is no shared method for turning “love one another” into specific, non‑optional obligations. Communities improvise their own thresholds and then retroactively declare those thresholds to be God’s will.
Even “love your neighbor as yourself” does not rescue the situation. It quietly assumes that the agent already knows how to love the self well. If a person’s self‑relation is distorted or self‑erasing, then “as yourself” simply imports that distortion into how others are treated. Other sayings then praise going beyond self‑regard into self‑sacrifice, without ever specifying where appropriate self‑giving ends and destructive self‑neglect begins. The command does not specify what sort of self it has in view, or how far that self may be spent for others. Once again, communities improvise their own thresholds of sacrifice and then canonize those thresholds as the true meaning of “love.” “Love” therefore is not a uniform ideal that must be met under the threat of sin, but something shown and given freely as each person understands it.
“Right relationship with God” as an empty container
A common theological response to the question of what constitutes sin is to say that sin is not lawbreaking but rupture of “right relationship with God.” Yet that simply renames the problem. The only detailed scaffolding that ever specified what right relationship meant—the law—has been declared fulfilled and set aside. With that structure gone, “right relationship” becomes an empty container, filled and refilled by different communities according to their own sense of what God must want and guesses about what Jesus would do. Without the legal scaffolding that once defined “right relationship”—Sabbath patterns, food rules, money rules, festival calendars, sacrificial procedures—“right relationship” names a hope, not a determinate standard.
Once you see this, many of the fiercest debates in Christian ethics are exposed as arguments over whose improvisation gets to masquerade as divine law. Churches insist that their particular mix of sexual norms, economic expectations, and piety practices are “biblical,” but the actual mechanism is simple: choose which parts of the old law to spiritualize, which to ignore, which to re‑enforce under new language, and then call the result “faithfulness.”
Since the law that created “sin” as a charge is genuinely finished, Christians are not living under a hidden, resurrected version of it. What remains is not a cosmic tally of infractions, but the very ordinary question of what actions do to other people and what kind of world those actions build. The bottom line is that the law has been fulfilled, sin has been defeated, and Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient for salvation.